Opus 12 watch replaces hands with rotating hour markers

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Harry Winston’s Opus 12 wristwatch is a mechanical marvel in miniature. The watch, among all sorts of interesting innovations that surely justify its reported $260,000 price tag, doesn’t use hour or minute hands. Rather, when you want to see what time it is, you go by the blue markers — these will let you know the time to within 5 minutes. Then, if you really want to know what time it is, you can look at the center of the watch (the arch) to get a fully accurate reading.

The Opus 12 below is showing 10:12 (and 30 seconds), and we know that because the hour hand is shorter than the minute hand, just like it should be. How is that possible if it’s just a mechanism that flips from silver to blue? You guessed it — each marker is actually made of two tabs that flip independently of one another, built into a single rotating structure. So there are two markers below that “H” — an the hour one with blue and silver sides and a shorter, minute one with the same. Pretty clever, no?

That’s just the start though. For example, when you go from one hour to the next, the all 12 hands flip over in sequence before the next marker stays changed. That’s means there is a cool throbber action around the watch that you, sort of a perk for making it through that power lunch or seemingly endless board meeting. That’s right: the watch has mechanical animation.

Unlike many crazily complex watches it looks to be quite easy to tell the time, which nice to see. It’s also a downright handsome timepiece — even my jealousy can’t keep me from admitting that.

The Opus 12 was designed by watchmaker extraordinaire Emmanuel Bouchet. It’s made up of 607 parts, has 45 hours of reserve power, and the run will be limited to just 120 units, so you’ll never have to worry about someone else at the country club having the same one.

For some fun, compare the timepiece above with the Opus 11. The Opus 12 is classy, understated, and reeks of precision, while the Opus 11 looks like a watch that was chewed up and spit out, and still managed to work. Their unifying quality? Overly prominent branding. Calm it down there Harry, no one thought this was a Timex.